Free the Echos!

When looking for the perfect electronic device that checks all of your boxes, you face a choice. You can either buy a nice, polished commercial device that was made to please the widest audience possible — not you specifically — or you can make your own that works exactly as you want and deal with some rough edges. But as YouTuber Mark Watt Tech pointed out in a recent video, there is another option.

To get the best of both worlds, you can hack a commercial device and install your own software on it. Now, this is a difficult path littered with bricked hardware and voided warranties, so most people avoid it. But with some guidance, it can be the perfect way to get exactly what you want from your electronics.

Mark Watt Tech focused on the Amazon Echo Show 5 smart display. Out of the box, these devices run a closed-source operating system that locks the user into Amazon’s ecosystem, for better or worse. If you want to install an app that is not approved by Amazon, you are out of luck. Similarly, if you want to get rid of the advertising that it constantly assaults you with in your home, there are no options to do that either.

For the method demonstrated by Mark Watt Tech to work, a first generation Echo Show 5 is required. Later models have protections that prevent them from working. If all goes according to plan, the result will be a smart display running LineageOS, a free and open-source operating system that you can tweak to your heart’s content.

In the video, Mark Watt Tech explains how to update the device to make sure an appropriate firmware version is installed before getting started. With that out of the way, the Fire ADB driver, which makes it possible to communicate with the Echo Show via a USB-connected computer, is installed. From there, the amonet exploit is used to replace the system firmware.

There are a lot of details involved, so be sure to give the video a careful watch before even considering trying this. And as Mark Watt Tech points out, this is definitely not supported by Amazon. You have to be willing to accept the fact that you may irreparably damage your hardware if anything goes wrong.